Beyond Environments

Beyond Environments

How can architectural periods and paradigms be used to explore deep space-making and the form/formless?

Our submission for beyond environment focuses on deep space-making, rather than assemblage or craft to create a total environment. Inspired by the collaboration between Gianni Pettena & Smithson, we are interested in form and formless, or the landscape and the mass.

From the material standpoint we are interested in the relationship between two profoundly simple architectural and engineering paradigms: the thoughtful detail and (for lack of a better term) the moment of elasticity. What this roughly means is employing tactical design devices (such as the foam) to be bounded, moderated, or parametrized, in the non-parametric sense, by moments of control (form work, breakage walls) – paired with moments of seepage or unpredictability. We do this because we are interested in weirdness.

Coming out of an architectural period obsessed with eect, surface, assemblage and willful dominance over material through fabrication, we are interested in exploring this ‘deep space’ in that we like the ability for our foam to have resonant meaning in it’s ability to absorb and be Borromini (San Carlo) with a twist of Turrell (Roden Crater), Hejduk (because always Hejduk) with a dash of Acconci (Walkways Through the Wall).

Our goal is to create a series of intentional forms with a formwork, disseminate this outrageous and catalytic foam throughout the space to ultimately end up with moments of bleed, landscape and formlessness.